Last night, like I mentioned, I took control of dinner. I got hungry handling the food, so I snacked on some yogurt.

YoBaby And Greek Yogurt

I mixed 1/2 a container of YoBaby with 1/2 a greek yogurt. The YoBaby was made for… well, babies and was sweet potato and apple flavored. It was actually pretty good! A little thin, but I suppose babies need it to be like that? If you’re wondering why we even had a YoBaby, there was an instore coupon to get it for free and I could not pass on free probiotics. I was very excited to see how the parents would respond to my dinner.

Broccoli Fries, Maple Baked Tofu, Brown Rice Medley With Vegan Butter

I stuck with my favorite simple vegetarian dish: maple tofu. I also made broccoli fries(which needed another 10 minutes but I wasn’t going to make others wait any longer) and some rice which I don’t particularly care for but knew my mom loves. Everyone seemed to like it! Even my mom was picking at second servings of the tofu from the pan. She later asked if it had soy in it, which she’s convinced is poison for woman over 40. Should I bother showing her it’s probably in 50% of everything she eats? I’ll save that amusement for another day. Literally 3 hours after this, for no reason whatsoever, it popped into my mind that this meal was completely vegan! I never would have pictured us as a family enjoying a vegan meal so much, and entirely accidentally. Later on I was still stuffed but wanted a little bit of chocolate cake.

Vitabrownie

Perfect. I love the touch of walnuts on top, which is weird because I’ve never made brownies with walnuts in them. I was thinking of making my gluten free brownies with walnuts instead of mints. Good thing I didn’t because I later found out that my aunt happens to break out with acne from walnuts(and she loves digging in to my desserts at the holidays ;-)). Later on I still had a chocolate tooth but this time more room to stomach oatmeal.

Oatmeal With Butter Toffee Peanut Butter And Chocolate Chips

Delicious. I swear I’m going to need a 5lb tun of Naturally Nutty‘s butter toffee to last through the next semester. I’ve thought about trying to recreate it with my food processor but I just don’t think I could; the texture is just too perfect with this one among other things.

This morning I slept in again. Maybe I need a New Years Resolution to get up on time? Thankfully, I had nowhere to go, just some things to address.

Recipes

These are all the recipes I plan on making before the New Year. 3 are for out New Years Eve party and 3 are for my own amusement. 4 of them are just adapted from internet ones but 2 are “homemade”. The first one I wanted to try was homemade deep chocolate vitatops; I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve spent on these so I was happy to get muffintop baking sheets for Christmas. After studying the ingredient list carefully, I wrote up a recipe that would almost match it exactly.

Homemade Vitatops

They certainly look like the real deal, don’t they? And they’re almost identical in every way, from calories to texture to even whole grains per serving(although I threw in a few extra chocolate chips because vitatops tend to skimp ;-)). So even though I haven’t tasted them yet, I’m going to count this as a win because the point wasn’t to make the best tasting thing I could but the best replica. I’ll post the recipe a little later on. After showering, I wanted a maple(not chocolate) breakfast.

Pumpkin Oatmeal With Mighty Maple And Pumpkin Cream Cheese

Greek Yogurt With Maple Butter

I need to eat my pumpkin cream cheese more because there was a little mold when I opened the container. Why, oh why. This happened last time and we had to throw out the whole thing, but this time I just skimmed the top and carried on(shh, don’t tell). I’d rather take the risk than lose the 6 dollars. The maple butter on yogurt was perfect; I’m going to be using the butter as the “special ingredient” in one of those 5 remaining recipes. But first up it’s time to take Montana to the vet for a check up! Of course the big lump of fur is still sound asleep.

Wow…those vitatops do look identical to the real deal! Go you…because those things ARE expensive!! My favorite is the vitatop corn muffins…so yum! I keep wanting them to come out with a lemon poppyseed flavor…oh my…I would be in heaven!

About

By day, I attend an ivy New England university. At night, I love to cook and taste. And somewhere in between all of that, I fuel for my passion of distance running. I blog about health tips, recipes, and product reviews. Have any questions? Want your product to be featured on my site? Drop me an email at Evan@FoodMakesFunFuel.com and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.